Lucas Oldale, a nine-year-old Grade 4 student from Langley, was preparing for the upcoming world invitational Pokemon card game championships in Nashville by playing 14-year-old Jaxson Piwek from Surrey, who is also going to the Nashville event, at Pastime Sports and Games in Langley City. Dan Ferguson Langley Times

She says the game has been a benefit to her son, whose reading and math skills have rapidly improved since he began playing.

And like any parent of a child who takes an intense interest in something, there is a lot of time spent transporting her talented son to competitions, both locally and across the border.

And practising, always practising.

“Every weekend, all weekend, this is what we do,” she says.

The 2018 Pokemon World Championships will be held at Nashville, Tenn. from Aug. 24 to Aug. 26.

The best players from all over the world will compete for the title of Pokemon TCG, Video Game, or Pokken Tournament World Champion, and for a combined prize pool worth more than $500,000 in prizes.

The Pokemon Trading Card Game is a collectible card game, based on the Pokemon video games, television and film series, books, comics, music, toys, and merchandise. It has sold over 25.7 billion cards worldwide, more than any other strategic card game.

It started as a video game on the original Game Boy that centered on fictional creatures called “Pokemon,” which humans catch and train to battle each other for sport.

Pokemon is considered the highest-grossing media franchise of all time, the world’s top-selling toy brand, the second best-selling video game franchise (after Nintendo’s Mario Brothers franchise) and the most successful television show ever based on a video game at over 1,000 episodes